My cup is half full.

You know, I find that my happiness in life is slowly increasing. It was a shock to move back to the bay area away from all that's been familiar for 8 years. I put a strain on my life momentarily, but as things settle and I become more used to being back, I'm finding that I'm becoming happier and happier. This may have something to do with no longer working for LPL too. (I suspect it actually has a LOT to do with that.) However, with all this, I find that my life is feeling more and more empty. How is it that I can be "happy" and still feel "empty?"

What I mean by empty is that I'm finding that there are things I want to accomplish but either cannot right now or just plain don't. With all this free time I feel like "now is the time" to do these things and yet there are other constraints which keep me from accomplishing them. For example, with the lack of job comes the lack of income. I have enough saved up to comfortably live. I am by no means "just scraping by" and luckily I have no outstanding debt. But with the lack of income I am more reserved in my spending, which in turn means I have a very hard time convincing myself that the roughly $400 bill in air travel to see my friends Lizzy and Matt in Georgia is worth it.

With all this time, I should be volunteering with organizations and helping out and yet I keep myself from doing these things because when I do get a job, I'll probably have to cut back on that and so I don't want to make a commitment right now that I may or may not be able to stick with later. Of course I have thought, "well, some help now is better than no help ever," but I somehow always dismiss that.

For those reasons I feel empty. I feel like I'm not accomplishing things with my time right now. I should put forth a greater effort. I need better time management skills in my personal life. I can time manage just fine with work, I'm good at prioritizing work responsibilities, but when it comes to my personal life the gauge for what is most important is hard to distinguish. I feel like a sim whose social, fitness, philanthropy, and love bars are in the red and I don't know which one to work on first.... and yet somehow my happiness meter is in the green (probably yellow-green). It's a strange feeling.

...

I think the first thing I want to do is what I've always said I wanted to do. I want to work on my fitness. I see my friends and they're all thinner than I am. I don't compare myself to them, as everyone is different, but I'm not blind. I can see that I'm usually the largest one when I hang out with people. It's easier here, in the bay area, surrounded by people I know care about me (friends included) than it was in San Diego surrounded by tanned and toned beach bodies all the time. My goals seem easier to reach here, partially because of my "motivating" father (he means well even if I don't always take it well), and partially because my goals are more realistic. I still have the same ultimate "goal weight" but I think the time-frame in which I wish to accomplish such a task doesn't seem like it needs to be as rushed as it did before.

I said before that I have a subscription to Fitness magazine. I changed my address with them and finally got the next issue here, maybe that is where all this is coming from. Or maybe it's just that time of year where I get the motivation bug. I have the resources, the support, and for the moment I have the motivation. I want it to stick this time, I have a glimmer of hope that it just might.